Join us for a training workshop
Join us in London on 20th March 2024 for our ‘Improving Grantseeker Experiences’ workshop, to learn how grantmakers can make their funding more accessible for everyone. It's a great chance to develop your skills and to meet and learn from grantmakers from totally different fields to yours. Book now.
Plus there's still a couple of places left on our Fundamentals of Modern Grantmaking workshop
too, on 27th March.Two key questions every funder should consider before even thinking about getting a new grants management systemMost funding organisations use some sort of digital system to help them keep track of grantees, grant applications, progress reports and so on. People use all sorts of different tech tools to manage their grants, from the ever popular ‘Put it all in a spreadsheet’ option, right through to bespoke technology systems that are built exactly to their needs. Whatever type of tech you use, the name for this sort of thing is a “Grants Management System”, commonly known as a GMS.
Deciding on which GMS to use is a
big choice for any funding organisation. Thankfully, there’s a number of free high-quality resources available to help you make an informed choice between software products. For example there's Tech Impact's ‘
A Consumers Guide to Grants Management Systems’ which compares and reviews a number of possible GMS options.
However, before you even get to the stage of comparing different potential GMS options we believe there’s at least two key questions every funder of every size and sector should debate and answer.
Question 1: How might the wrong GMS undermine your values? Despite what the software vendors might say, your GMS isn’t really best thought of as a humble tool. It’s more like a powerful carthorse that you can either harness to do what you need, or which can run off in completely the wrong direction dragging your whole organisation with it. These days, it’s often the system that your team will use for most key organisational tasks, including end-to-end grantmaking activities, plus the management of most of your key data and financial information. As a result, your organisation will become what your GMS allows it to be.
That is why it’s so important for funders to agree, well in advance of choosing a GMS,
what values this system needs to help you to live up to. For example, let's say you're a funder that really values trust-based grantmaking. You might then develop a list of requirements that are centered around things you value, such as:
- An ability to accept reporting in a wide range of non-standard formats, to avoid grantees having to waste time producing reports just to slot into your system.
- Not setting the default grant duration at some short length, such as 12 months (see page 5 of this guide).
- Having progress monitoring that doesn't treat a variation from the original plan like a problem or a deviation that needs documenting, critiquing and approving.
But let's say you work for a funder that for whatever reason doesn't really do trust-based grantmaking - you'll s
till have organisational values, and they can still be undermined by getting the wrong GMS, or getting the right GMS and setting it up wrong.
One value that's probably pretty much universal to funders is fairness. Here your GMS can be a help or a hinderance too. For example, you'll want to ensure that any GMS is accessible.
If your new GMS isn’t accessible it simply means that some people won’t be able to use it. This could be people working within your organisation or people trying to apply to you. We’ve come across too many examples of systems that don't meet accessibility standards, so we know this to be a real danger, not just a hypothetical one.
Question 2: How will you improve your GMS over time?The most fatal mistake that funders make when getting a GMS is to assume that once it’s ‘all set up’ then it’s ‘done’, as if it is a new office dishwasher. It isn’t. Not even close.
If your organisation is going to get continually better at what it does, you’re going to need your GMS to get continually better too. This means you cannot fudge the question “How, exactly, is the GMS going to keep improving?”
Some large funders employ a team of people whose job it is to customise and improve software that the organisation uses, on an ongoing basis. This is an amazing way to be able to do things if you can, but most of our readers won’t be in that lucky position.
Much more common is for funders to contract third party suppliers to maintain and make more complex changes to their chosen GMS, while the grantmakers make relatively easy changes themselves. This is a totally legit way of arranging things, but it's also where things can go wrong, and where GMSes can go stale and bake in all sorts of bad things.
You need to make sure upfront that your contract with your chosen supplier prices in and includes a good mechanism for continually making changes and improvements to the GMS. If this isn’t considered at the time of initial procurement then you can find yourself in a situation where you may only have a very limited amount of time available for changes to be made by your supplier, or where each little change you want is really expensive and painful to arrange, like a contract negotiation of its own.
Furthermore, given that some of the changes to the system will be made directly by your colleagues, you need to make sure they are given a bit of time and space to learn how to modify the tool, not just use it. This will often require a bit of training to help them build confidence.
It’s understandable, human nature even, to focus on
which new GMS you're going to get, rather than how you're going to make improvements to it steadily over time. We encourage you to fight any instinct to postpone thoughts about the future, because it’s highly likely that you’ll be using your new GMS for years. If you don't or can't improve the way it works over time, it'll be bad for you and worse for your grantees.
That’s why we suggest:
- Budgeting from the very start for improving your GMS on an ongoing basis, not just the procuring of it in the first place. This could mean developing skills internally and/or making sure that your contract with any third party supplier allows for appropriately quick and substantial changes.
- Ensuring that your governance processes will support ongoing improvement. If you’re going to need board sign off for future GMS changes your system will rot, and fast. The world, and especially technology, moves too fast for that kind of old school decision-making.
Talk to us about our consulting for grantmakers
We deliver consulting to help grantmakers with a range of practical problems, such as:
- Designing scoring and rating systems
- Getting trustees to make key decisions
- Developing strategies
- Designing new funding programmes Here's more information on how we can help.Get in touch here,
or just hit reply, and we'll be happy to chat. Latest Reading - Modern Grantmaking recommends How about a new job or trustee role in grantmaking?- The Libra Foundation (US) is hiring for a President. $525,000 to $550,000, commensurate with experience. Deadline is 17:00 PT. 8 March.
- The Rory Peck Trust (UK) is hiring for a new Director. £60,000 - £65,000 per year. Deadline is 10 March 2024.
Dulverton Trust (UK) is hiring for a Director. £90,000 per year. Deadline is 17:00 20 March. - The Wellcome Trust (UK) is hiring a Technology Lead in the Data for Science and Health team. Salary: £80,224. Deadline is 10th March 2024.
- New Philanthropy Capital (UK) is hiring for an Associate Director, Transforming Funding. £52,000 – £60,000 per year. Deadline is 12 noon 11 March.
- Porticus (Netherlands) is hiring for an External Caring for the Earth Investment Committee Member. This is a voluntary role, part-time. Deadline is 09.00 CET, 11 March.
- Greggs Foundation (UK) is hiring for new trustees. Deadline is 12 noon, 25 March 2024.
- Global Fund for Women is hiring for a Vice President, Programs & Co-Lead, Global Partnerships. $160,000 - $248,000. International candidates will be considered, but US candidates are preferred. Role advertised from mid-February. No deadline provided.
Jobs comment. This month one of the single biggest jobs in UK grantmaking has come up - CEO of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). The person who does it will oversee 8000 staff and £9bn of annual grantmaking.
BUT… the job ad doesn’t
#ShowTheSalary, so we ain’t linking to it from here. Not showing the salary biases jobs towards certain types of applicants: the most important jobs in our society shouldn’t be advertised like this.
So, - want to see your job ad in next month’s newsletter? Ping us, it’s free! Just…
#ShowTheSalaryGrantmaking ‘joke’ of the monthWhat's the difference between a black hole and a grantmaker with disproportionate reporting requirements?
Both have an insatiable appetite for information, but at least the black hole eventually stops asking follow-up questions.
The joke this week was supplied by the chief executive of a UK foundation. You know who you are, thanks for sharing!
Got any terrible or actually funny grantmaking jokes to share?...Tell us :-)
Have you been forwarded this newsletter? Want to subscribe?No problem -
sign up here.Who writes this newsletter?We are Gemma Bull and Tom Steinberg - we run Modern Grantmaking. We do
consulting and
training specifically for funders, and
wrote a book on how to be a modern grantmaker, too. We love chatting to anyone with any interesting news in grantmaking-land, so please do get in touch.